Countless enterprises would like their IT operations to be more cloud-like.

They want greater speed and elasticity, with the ability to quickly scale resources up or down as needs and projects dictate. They want to rightsize their technology systems and investments, with tools that help identify underprovisioned resources to free up capacity and overprovisioned resources to improve application performance. And they want to leverage automation and self-service provisioning to scale their operations without adding more staff and without the risks and inconsistencies that often result from shadow IT deployments.

And yet, for a variety of reasons -whether it's cost, support for legacy or homegrown applications, data sovereignty/compliance/sensitivity, or a combination thereof -a wholesale shift to the cloud is impractical for many companies.

Fortunately, cloud operating models can be established with on-prem systems.

Take NterOne, for instance. The IT training and consulting leader has to continuously deploy and decommission full IT environments for its classes, labs, and proofs of concept around the world. Because doing so from the public cloud would be prohibitively expensive -and in many cases architecturally infeasible -NterOne essentially built their own cloud and agile operating model with Cisco data center solutions.

They've tightly integrated their compute (UCS X-Series), hyperconverged (HyperFlex), storage (NetApp), and network (Cisco ACI) systems, which are now orchestrated with the combination of Cisco Intersight and Nexus Dashboard.

In other words, they're creating an on-prem cloud and accelerating their internal operations accordingly.

With modern data center systems providing unprecedented levels of flexibility, automation, and policy-based consistency, any organization can now achieve cloud efficiency, speed, and scale.

Learn more about NterOne's infrastructure-as-code:

Read the full NterOne case study

Additional resources

Cloud and compute customer stories

Cisco data center and hybrid cloud solutions